BOOKS
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the stubble." One recalls that the subtitle of Davie's collection is "Poems
About the Sacred." They are also very much poems about our modern
world as it carries on its vital and often raucously noisy existence.
As
Hill
does, Davie refrains from separating religious interest from the contagions of
the modern world.
Like Hill, Davie knows his Allen Tate and sometimes alludes to him. A
whole passage in Davie's poem "Zion," quoted here, refers to Tate's poem
"Aeneas at Washington":
Once, stuck in the mud by the Capitol,
you thought of the ninth buried city,
Richmond, Montgomery, what you had built them for,
ofTroy, and of Rome, of Richmond, of Rome not
Zion ...
In "Aeneas at Washington," Tate's Trojan hero stands in the rain:
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water . . ..
His hero is later:
Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
And he says:
I thought ofTroy, what we had built her for.
Why Richmond and Montgomery? Because Montgomery was the first
capital of the Southern Confederacy, soon to be superseded by Richmond,
Virginia. Davie is doing more than merely teasing his old friend;he has an–
other matter in view: Man's spiritual capital ultimately ought to be seen as
more important than his political capital, whether it
be
London or Washington
or Rome itself
The setting of Davie's poem "Nashville Mornings" embodies other
references to his own personal concerns. For many years he taught in
Nashville at Vanderbilt University. Nashville's old claim to be "the Athens of
the South" has more and more been superseded by its new title as "the
Home of Country Music." The reference to Elvis Presley and his platinum–
plated Rolls and to the tourists crowding the road out to see the homes of the
stars attests as much. In such an environment St. Cecilia does indeed "irk" on
Nashville mornings. But the poet who means to write about sacred things has
to be scrupulously honest and face the brute facts, including, along with more
